Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

a plague of a kind which had never been met with before ravaged our land of England. The Bishop of Rochester, who maintained only a small household, lost four priests, five esquires, ten attendants, seven young clerics and six pages, so that nobody was left to serve him in any capacity. At Mailing he consecrated two abbesses but both died almost immediately, leaving only four established nuns and four novices. One of these the Bishop put in the charge of the lay members and the other of the religious, for it proved impossible to find anyone suitable to act as abbess.

‘To our great grief,’ went on the monk,

the plague carried off so vast a multitude of people of both sexes that nobody could be found who would bear the corpses to the grave. Men and women carried their own children on their shoulders to the church and threw them into a common pit. From these pits such an appalling stench was given off that scarcely anyone dared even to walk beside the cemeteries.

There was so marked a deficiency of labourers and workmen of every kind at this period that more than a third of the land in the whole realm was let lie idle. All the labourers, skilled or unskilled, were so carried away by the spirit of revolt that neither King, nor law, nor justice, could restrain them…

During the whole of that winter and the following spring, the Bishop of Rochester, aged and infirm, remained at Trottiscliffe [his country manor between Sevenoaks and Rochester], bewailing the terrible changes which had overcome the world. In every manor of his diocese buildings were falling into decay and there was hardly one manor which returned as much as £ 100. In the monastery of Rochester supplies ran short and the brethren had great difficulty in getting enough to eat; to such a point that the monks were obliged either to grind their own bread or to go without. The prior, however, ate everything of the best.

The chronicler probably had his facts right so far as the details of the Bishop’s establishment were concerned but his qualifications are less impressive as an observer of the agricultural scene in Kent or, still more, ‘the whole realm’. The reference to ‘more than a third of the land’ lying idle had as little statistical significance as similar statements that half or three-quarters of the population were dead. It was certainly exaggerated; but quite as certainly it was a tribute to the very real dislocation which had afflicted the farming lands of Kent and the forlorn and unkempt air which they must often have presented.

The priory and convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, suffered little in the epidemic, only four inmates dying. Thorold Rogers attributes this to the good water supply and efficient drainage system which had been installed by an earlier prior. It is hard to accept any very direct relationship between bubonic plague and pure drinking water, {310} but the fact that the establishment was clean and free from rats would certainly have helped to keep infection at bay. It is surprising that the flow of pilgrims to Canterbury hardly slackened even when the plague was at its worst. {311} It might have been supposed that the mortality among putative pilgrims and the obvious perils of travel in time of pestilence would have been enough to scare off even the most devout. Presumably those who had already survived an outbreak wished to give thanks for their deliverance while those who were yet to experience one hoped to accumulate merit in advance. In neither case was the result likely to be wholly satisfactory. No doubt their determination was welcome in Canterbury, since every visitor was a source of income, but as each wave of arrivals brought in fresh infection even the most avaricious of citizens must have asked himself whether the blessing was an unmixed one.

Somehow the old and decrepit Bishop Haymo of Rochester managed to survive while all his retinue perished around him. Reference has already been made to the long-established belief that the Black Death struck down the strong in the prime of their life and spared the children and the aged. {312} In this, as in all things, it would have been like the Bishop to seek to conform to tradition. But such evidence as exists does not support the theory. Analysing five hundred and five inquisitions post-mortem, Professor Russell found that by far the heaviest mortality, 46 per cent, occurred in one of the most senior age-groups, those between fifty-six and sixty. {313} The oldest age group of all, those above sixty, suffered next most badly, with mortality of almost 40 per cent. It is, of course, true that a higher proportion of this group would anyhow be likely to die within any given period even without the Black Death to help them on their way. But the incidence of mortality is still strikingly higher than among those in the prime of their life: only 20 per cent for those between twenty-one and twenty-five; 19 per cent for the twenty-six to thirties; and 28 per cent for the thirty to thirty-fives. Tradition does seem to be right, however, in maintaining that the children were spared. Only 7 per cent died of those between six and ten and 15 per cent between eleven and fifteen.

By these rules the Bishop was fortunate to have outlived his priests and outstandingly lucky to have survived his pages. After such hazards one might think that he had earned a tranquil old age. But new troubles beset him. Even when the worst of the plague was over he found that his clergy hesitated to do their duty in their parishes; preferring either to remain prudently at home or to abandon their flock to their fate and retreat to what they hoped might prove a safer area. The phenomenon was by no means peculiar to Kent but it seems to have been particularly remarked on there. Stephen Birchington of Canterbury also referred to the fact that ‘…parish churches remained altogether unserved, and beneficed parsons turned away from the care of their benefices for fear of death…’ {314}

Dene of Rochester in his turn commented on the decadence which had overtaken the country under the stress of the Black Death. His strictures on workmen possessed by the spirit of revolt have already been noted but worse was to follow: ‘The entire population, or the greater part of it, has become even more depraved, more prone to every kind of vice, more ready to indulge in evil and sinfulness, without a thought of death, or of the plague which is just over, or even of their own salvation… So, day by day, the peril in which the souls of clergy as well as people are to be found has grown more dangerous…’

One sees Dene of Rochester as a crabbed, reactionary figure, passed over for promotion, embittered, filled with the darkest doubts about the younger generation. But there are too many similar reports to leave room for doubt that he had grounds for his grumblings.

There is not much to delay one in the other counties of the south. In Hertfordshire, March and April were the worst months. But many cases occurred even when the summer was over and there seems to have been a second, milder outbreak in the course of 1350. In certain manors, where the ravages of the plague had been particularly ferocious, it became the custom to head future schedules of expenditure with ‘an enumeration of the lives which were lost and the tenancies which were vacated after the great death of 1348.’ {315} The archdeaconry, an area considerably larger than that of the county, does not seem to have suffered particularly badly. In the low-lying fen district, St Ives lost only 23 per cent, Holland 24 per cent and Peterborough 27 per cent of the beneficed clergy. {316} Marshes and fens, perhaps because of their association with mosquitoes, are generally linked in the popular mind with fever and disease. In the case of the Black Death they belied their reputation. One possible explanation is that they were often remote from the sea and the main lines of communications and therefore to some extent sheltered from infection. Another is that such damp and sparsely inhabited areas held little appeal for the wandering rat. But the impact of the plague was too spasmodic to allow even exceptions to the general rule to be defined exactly and certain areas of fen country suffered as badly as any in the country.